(What should young artists do?)
While they are young they should go to Western Europe, America or maybe anywhere to study. They can study anything: art, languages, behaviour, relativity, and they can establish friendships and connections. Then a few years later they should come home and work in Hungary, from Hungary, and maintain relationships. They should go out in the world and then they should maintain their relationships. It is compulsory and it is not entertainment but work. If you want something, you must do it. This is the only possible way.
(And what else should they do when they come back home?)
Well, the usual process of the „western”part of Hungarian artist careers is that they go abroad for a while, and what they bring home from there makes them geniuses at home, they Hungarianise it a little, then they Hungarianise it a lot, and finally they become conservative Hungarian artists, and they stand in everybody’s way – even in their own way.
I know it sounds sad, but this is still the most dynamic part of Hungarian art. In fact it is a well-practised, quite well operating and historically justified system, and it is not very easy to divert from it. However, it would be more interesting to try it the other way round: to go abroad, study, and work at home, but concentrate on how you could present a Hungarian (Eastern European) problem in the west. It would be more difficult, because you could only do it in Hungary, but you should know the West and the operational mechanisms very well, and you would also have to work and play with the clichés they use in connection with us in the West. You should be able to master these. We have rather naiv and not actualised ideas about these clichés.
(What do you think about the centre – periphery distribution?)
Well, obviously, Hungary is the centre of the world; everything else is on the peripheries. Emotionally… But this is not what you asked. I think that all kinds of distributions of the world are only metaphysical. I think that we’d better talk about „strong and weak positions”. The things that have recently come from Island, Israel, China or South Africa – just to mention a few „positions”- are interesting. But can these places be regarded as „centres”because of this? No, they don’t, but they are in a strong position.
Centres and peripheries were characteristic of the 19th century. If you think about something similar, it is rather the projection of an earlier situation. Today we receive much more information about the world; people’s attention is not concentrated on a single centre only. Iceland, Israel, China and South Africa are very different countries, but what makes their art interesting is that the performance of these societies is very special in some way. This is the point. This is why they are in a strong situation. Obviously the centre of art is New York. But is New York interesting? I am not sure. More interesting things come from other places. To New York – you could say. Yes, everything goes to New York, but today it may not be so evident any more… Something is changing in this field, and it would be nice to belong to this changing part.
What is a centre? Is it a place from where interesting new art comes? Or is it a place that accommodates things and melts them together like a smelter? Or is it a place that manipulates information with money and power? One thing is for sure: for example in New York the centralising structures of international art life are very well built… But what do you want? If you concentrate on this, it will only paralyse you. I dare to say that Hungarian self-interpretation based on the obsolete centre and periphery aspect only serves the self-justification of pessimistic intellectual defeatism. In fact my point is that there is no point in crying over the fact that Hungary is not (and will not be) a centre, because it does not prevent anyone from producing more interesting art. And today it is more valid than ever.
So I think that the art of a certain society is closely related to the actual performance of the whole society. This is why it would be worth thinking it over what the performance of Hungarian society is like. Before we were talking about clichés forced on us. Well, the performance of Hungarian society is generally judged quite well. They still think that Hungarians are lively, initiative and creative, they are ingenious people who could live and survive even in the middle of nowhere. This is what they write and say about us very benevolently, especially with respect to our accession to the EU. As compared to this it seems to me that we ourselves do not really believe in it, and our aim is to show up some good, modest, diligent, exemplary pupil like performance – something like the exemplary pupil face of Hungarian politics turned abroad. This kind of exemplariness is not really interesting in art, even if it is sold on computers.
In Hungarian society there is a much stronger general tension than art presently undertakes to deal with. I have simple expectations. You can only appear with a strong Hungarian (Eastern European) voice, if you represent more than just some personal or insular artistic problem. An American artist may achieve great success with this attitude, but not a Hungarian artist.
(So time for social realism has come again?)
I know that this reaction is negative, because you either think about a national program or populism or socialist realism. It is all ridiculous, and these are all obsolete ideological constructions. We should try to approach the subject without an ideology and find a solution for making art more active. We should create a stronger role. It would be great if fine art were as interesting as a good movie!
(Are you saying that art here is weak?)
I am not saying that it is bad! It is weak, as a small child is weak… The situation is a bit like in the economy: strong economies come out well from a modernisation crisis, while weak economies drown. In the West and in America modern art – in the course of an astonishing self-destructive crisis – is starting to become mass art, while in Eastern Europe, as a result of the same crisis, it has become completely isolated and it is languishing. Its only real problem is its own languishing. Art cannot be revived today only by dealing with its own internal problems.
(And what about the future?)
Are you asking me if it is realistic at all that art which gains the society’s interest can be created here? Well, if we made efforts, if we taught it at the college and if we forced it very much (why am I talking in the plural?), then something might happen…, although sincerely speaking I do not really think that it would inspire anyone very much. Hungarian art, the whole culture is basically aristocratic. It cultivates first of all an aristocratic, elite attitude even today, which cannot really be reconciled with turning towards others in an unbiased way. All of us are just all used-to-be countesses and counts, suffering from the world that does not understand us and feeling sorry for ourselves. This is why everything we do, even including our languishing, is still a bit like an operetta, because our aristocratic attitude is not justified by anything in the world.
I must point it out that as long as only a narrow layer of the elite can pay money for art, it will not change. The alternative is that artists should earn money in another way, not with their art, so that they can be free, but it is not a good solution either. There are a few things that should be considered again: 1. How much should art cost? And it is immediately followed by another questions: 2. What kind of art should cost that much? We should try and test the sales structures. There are a few people who know this. But it is difficult… I have the feeling that the efforts are sometimes made in quotation marks, „as art”.
However, there is also a real chance on the horizon, which is just what you have always dreamt about. EU accession draws people’s attention to us, once again. They are waiting to see what we are bringing with us, how we articulate our problems, or if we just varnish up things to what a nice little up-to-date people we are. For a few years we would have very good chances, but not with modest good-pupil-like works. Nobody believes that Hungary is just a „simple case”.
Bamberg, 12th March 2001
Ákos Birkás